Over the course of a decade, Michelin-starred fine diner Labyrinth has flown the flag high for Singaporean cuisine. In its earliest days, the 26-seater restaurant focused primarily on uplifting street eats like oyster omelette through a pioneering provocative style of cuisine known as Neo-Sin where diners’ senses and perceptions were challenged.
The restaurant’s next gastronomic journey took a turn to highlight produce hewn directly from Singaporean land and its surrounding waters. Some 80 percent of his menu became local-sourced as he teamed locavore philosophy with vibrant story telling from his childhood.
Now, Labyrinth – ranked no.30 on the Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list for 2024 – celebrates its 10th year in business with a menu seeking to embrace historic eats for a modern audience. To do this, the culinary team worked closely with experts in the fading and forgotten, uncovering heritage dishes never included before in its menu and injecting it with the restaurant’s signature style.
“This menu really encompasses old school ways of doing things. No molecular, nothing fancy. We cook and finish a la minute,” explains chef-owner Han Li Guang, better known as LG. Ultimately, it is not about remaking nor replicating the dish. It is about embracing the original elements and flavours while giving the dish its own character through the “Labyrinth” spin.
Dishes in the new menu include Wartime Rojak, a colonial remnant bearing strong British influences quite unlike the version you’d find today. Han’s recipe, based on a cookbook of dishes from the 1940s titled Wartime Kitchen, presents on a pineapple base beetroot done two ways – a salt-baked rosette of beetroot alongside a beetroot sorbet, fortified with other flairs like a granita of cucumber, lettuce and mint and a sambal tomat.
There’s also a creative new take on hawker staple char kway teow, which replaces the usual flat white rice noodles with seabass fish maw – an adjustment said to be made on “the advice of stall owners at Chinatown”. Liver sausage (lup cheong) from that same fish maw seller, charcoal-grilled South African abalone, housemade oyster sauce and a healthy dose of deep-fried lard round out the dish.
Laksa Siglap is another hard-to-find hawker dish given new life at Labyrinth. For those who don’t know, the original version boasts slippery handmade noodles hewn from tapioca starch and rice flour drenched in a broth heavy with rempah, coconut, tamarind and pounded fish. The restaurant’s take features a similar aromatic base, but presents it alongside oil-poached Medai (pacific barrelfish) and an urap (Balinese salad) of wing beans, bean sprouts, spinach and desiccated coconut.
Other familiar icons of Singaporean life like The Satay Club’s well, satay, goreng pisang (fried banana fritters), Fuzhou oyster cakes, Rotiboy (the brand name of a popular coffee-based bread snack), chicken rice, and zi char staple cereal prawns – now reimagined in ice-cream form – are featured on the menu too.
Lunch costs $208++ per person, while the all-in dinner costs $298++ each.
Labyrinth is at 8 Raffles Avenue #02-23 Esplanade Mall Singapore 039802.
All photos courtesy of Labyrinth.
